Nick Douglas's dashboard

Agreed. I whined about it on my blog: http://toomuchnick.com/post/104394324...

Still getting messages meant for Nick Strauss. Still driving me crazy.

It's been months. Twinkle is still making its users accidentally reply to me. I don't know who I am any more. I even shouted the question at the wind on the edge of a cliff. "Who am I?" No answer. Please fix this, Twinkle.

Conceded, 20 cents is way too much to keep getting charged. Hell, it's too much for a text message, especially considering the minuscule data that's being transmitted. – Nick, on July 16, 2008 03:33

So! I signed up for Loopt because I want a service to replicate the experience from Dodgeball (which lost many of its few users out in San Francisco around a year ago when Google bought it and let it stagnate). I specifically want to dip into a page that tells me where my friends are, so I can decide where to go when I feel like going out but have no plans of my own.

So I joined Loopt because it sounded like Dodgeball without the need to manually enter the name of the place I'm at. I don't want to be constantly tracked, but I do want to tap my phone once and have my location registered. Not everyone is into this; I am.

Loopt lets me invite friends. It marks all the people on my phone's contact list whose carriers support Loopt; it also marks the people who already use Loopt. The only people it automatically wanted to invite, as far as I could tell, were those already using Loopt. And even then I was able to uncheck some of those people before I sent an invitation. So far, the only people who've accepted invitations from me are people I know I invited.

A day or two later, people start complaining about getting a text message. Now I agree that this can be quite annoying, especially when it comes from several people, or from someone you don't particularly like. It also sounds more annoying to get it from a corporate shortcode than from the number of the recipient.

But really? Long-term, this is the tiniest possible blip. A few people will send Loopt invitations, then Britekite will release their app and everyone will switch (Loopt works fine but more of the "early adopter" crowd is already registered with Britekite), and no one will talk about Loopt again outside of terrible conferences attended by Seesmic and Mahalo and Plaxo and whatnot.

As for the cost, any amount is too much but jesus, it's what, ten cents? Is this not the very definition of Merlin's own term, the First World Problem?

So! Loopt is boring, whiners are boring, I'm boring myself here so I'm gonna go watch some videos of Merlin to cheer up.

Valleywag charted out reviews by top writers, and they all say the iPhone screen is surprisingly unscratchable.

http://valleywag.com/tech/critical-co...

You can send files, a feature unavailable on Twitter. But isn't that what e-mail is for? Maybe sending files without using e-mail would be a slick solution if EVERYONE used Pownce, but that's not a realistic expectation.